Hotly anticipated by fans of the sprawling graphic novels, Netflix’s adaptation of The Sandman comes with outsized expectations, a built-in audience, and what looks like an eye-watering budget. After a long and difficult production journey, with many false starts, Sandman hits Netflix on August 5 in the US and the UK on August 8.
The Sandman has a story to tell
The trailer, as in Book 1, opens with an arcane ritual set in 1919, intended to banish the spectre of Death, as she’s had a somewhat busy decade.
Instead, the rite summons the King of Dreams (known here, simply, as Dream) aka the Sandman of the title. It also traps him for a century, before he makes a bid for freedom and heads for his crumbling kingdom. To save humanity’s capacity to dream, he must embark on the ultimate 12-steppers’ journey, righting millennia of wrongs.
Quite why the ability to dream matters in the show’s universe isn’t revealed in trailers, though it offers much scope to explore the source material’s ideas on what it is to be a dreaming and sometimes fearful, human.
Though it thrusts a cult favorite into the mainstream, a move that fails more often than it succeeds, there’s hope that this 10- part series won’t jettison The Sandman’s essential weirdness. Neil Gaiman’s direct involvement in the series would seem a positive sign, based on Good Omens or (indirectly) Stardust: he’s again part of the screenwriting team, as well as credited with an on-screen role.
Central to that otherworldly feel is a frame-filling Jim Sturridge in the title role: his Dream is dangerous and rock-star rangy, with insectoid oddness, while giving the camera an imperious, runway-ready face.
The rest of Sandman’s casting, gender-swapped for some characters, while glittering with star power, seems engineered to draw in sci-fi and fantasy fans. This suggests Netflix is rather hedging its bets: enlisting loyal fandom support while hoping for a crossover hit like Stranger Things, since shedding subscribers. Among others, Sandman features charismatic alumnae of Doctor Who (Jenna Coleman), Netflix’s live-action reboot of the Anime series Cowboy Bebop (Mason Alexander Park), and Game of Thrones (Gwendoline Christie) in prominent roles.
A DC property, the graphic novels represent a high watermark of 90s-era experimentation as one of Neil Gaiman’s first forays into the medium. They’re also a challenge for any screenwriter to adapt, with much head-hopping and multiple plot strands.
It’s by no means sure the series will surprise genre fans who know all the tropes and beats when such subversions are a large part of what makes the source text so compelling.
The Sandman also seems unlikely to attract a less invested audience than Gaiman fans with content from teasers and trailers alone: viewed cold, they’re atmospheric and handsomely mounted but contain little to distinguish from any other recent fantasy series.
The first look and trailers hint, at the very least, it’ll be fun finding out if The Sandman lives up to expectations, detonates an online outrage bomb in the fandom, or even wins Gaiman’s original work a whole new generation of fans.
The Sandman is streaming on Netflix today in the U.S.